Site speed is important for SEO, but can be hard to achieve in WordPress. One of my favourite tools for site is the Google PageSpeed Insights tool – who better to tell you what your site needs to be SEOed? So let’s take a look at our client’s brand new WordPress site:

It’s not the worst page speed I’ve ever seen. But it’s not far off the worst.

The worst PageSpeed score possible – zero %

but this site does need some work. Fix the biggest problems first. A common cause of problems is image size, and that’s what’s happening on this WordPress site:

The top four account for the lion’s share of the image size. Let’s take a look in the directory, because we’ve only looked at one page (the homepage), but the whole site needs to be optimised.

There are plenty of big images. This can happen when a graphic designer is uploading unoptimised images. They focus on image quality, and tend not to think about filesize and performance.

Let’s take a closer look at the biggest file:

That’s a bit big. Let’s get it down to something that won’t eat up all the bandwidth quota of a visitor’s data plan. It’s a big homepage image slider, so it still needs to be big enough to look good.

We scaled it down to 180kb. Let’s see the effect on the site speed tool.

We’ve jumped 7 points on the scale, and we’re approaching half way there! Let’s do all the rest that google flagged, and see what happens. First the jpegs…we could A) optimise each one individually to check for artifacts, or we could B) batch compress.

Anyway, on with optimising.

The logo is problematic – it’s HUUUGE. Let’s fix this and see what Google thinks…

We’re nearly half way there, but even better – images aren’t our biggest problem anymore, which is great. Time to dive down into the code.

We move onto the server / code optimisation, and we bring the WordPress site to 100% optimised.

Do have a WordPress Website that needs a speed boost? Sort out your images first! If your site is transactional, and you need to optimise your revenue get in touch. or leave your questions in the comments.

The manager at HYC, Paddy Judge is a former pilot and aircrash investigator – knows where to site an antenna and working with the IOT team in Vinyl Matt Media to get some fantastic coverage.

Position tracking for marine vessels.

The results were so good that the nice people at marinetraffic.com gave a us a ‘pro’ level account a few weeks early, and we look forward to forward to seeing the value that their suit of tools adds to HYC’s operation.

Once you’ve setup the SPF, it should be tested. The good people at Kitterman Technical Services, Inc. have an <a href="http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate more helpful hints.html” target=”_blank”>excellent tool for this. Don’t get caught out. Test.

Things are picking up and it’s back to business: selling hotel rooms to visitors. But margins are tight, and 20% booking fees are a luxury no one can afford. Competitors are all offering online booking and they’re undercutting you. And then there’s AirBnB to compete with. What to do?

Easy: Take control of your own web presence!

You can easily run your own online presence, and you’ll be surprised how quickly the bookings start coming in. Read on to find out how.

1. Get yourself a Local Website Designer

Gone are the days when you needed to go to Silicon Valley to get one of those website thingys made.

It’s best to use local content for local websites.

Get a local web developer to create a modern, responsive (that means mobile friendly) website. Big agencies can be expensive and lack the local content imagery and linkages that make for engaging content and Organic Search Success.

Go local. You can have a website for a few hundred euro with local support. Perfect.

2. Take Really Good Pictures

Exterior Photo of Property should feature on homepage of site.

Gombeens naturally assume that their customers are telepathic and because they know what their premises looks like, so will their customers.

So don’t get caught: make sure you have really good pictures of your property. You’re going to need them again and again.

Get good photography of all the room types you have. Show off the features. Good imagery sells.

3. Right image, right place.

A 14mm lens on a full frame camera will show off a small room to its best. Don’t forget to use a tripod.

You want more bookings through your website, right? Your customers need to see what they are booking.

A Gombeen that expects to be able to use a picture of their bar, car park, or grandmother to sell a room. This is a sure recipe for disappointment.

Show wide-angle images of whole rooms in the online booking room descriptions. These ‘set the scene’ and help convert lookers to bookers.

Be accurate with the room contents when you take the pictures. Don’t sell features that aren’t there.

4. Offer online booking.

Enquiry Forms – Unpopular and slow..

If you don’t sell online, you’re losing out to rivals that do. No-one waits for you to come back to an enquiry form.

Be wary of commission heavy services. The cost has to be passed on somewhere, usually in room pricing. This has a tendency to divert bookings into traditional channels, taking up precious staff time.

We recommend our product, BookServe (ahem). You can sign up in minutes.

5. Check the rates in your area

Published Rates are easy to Find

This used to be done by getting your cousin to ring up and ask for a quote. Half the time they knew it was her and quoted her a much higher price, just to mess with you. Now with D’Internet, it’s more straightforward.

Check the rates around and be competitive. If you find you’re getting visits but no bookings, high prices are usually the problem.

6. Consider listing on Expedia

Billboard effect on Room Nights. The green line is the hotel’s own website.

It can be worthwhile to connect to Expedia. Share your excess rooms with Expedia and raise the traffic to your own website with the ‘Billboard Effect‘.

This effect works because visitors use Expedia to make a list of hotels and then look on the hotels’ own websites for direct booking.

The Gallery, following a safety review, had to limit wheelchair access to the lower floors of the buildings. It was decided to create a digital version of the exhibition and to make it available in a kiosk in the downstairs areas.

The timeframe for the completion of the project was short. We used our FastReach CMS to coordinate the collation and display of the exhibition digital assets, and worked closely with the curation team in IMMA to ensure fidelity to the exhibition in the timeframe available.

The first IMMA exhibition tour, which coincides with the gallery’s 20th anniversary this year, was completed in just 34 working days, during which time 460 artworks were logged and loaded into the database, as well as 42 online HD videos and 31 virtual tours. The virtual tour of the final exhibition was released the same week.

The virtual tour provides 360 degree views of each room in the gallery. A detailed introductory synopsis of each room is provided and, as you explore the wings and landings of the IMMA, you follow the physical layout of the exhibition.

Additional social features, including artwork thumbnails and the option to pull discussions about artworks into online groups, help facilitate collaboration between groups of artists, commentators and students, and also make it easier to share links.

The IMMA virtual tour appeared on the 1st page of Google the day after its release for searches of artwork titles and, after just three days, one quarter of all its traffic was from google-generated artwork searches. Within the first month of its launch in excess of 3600 visitors viewed over 57,000 online gallery pages.

The team behind the project includes the co-founder of Rollthrus (Disabled Access Portal): Chris Healy, project manager Matthew McGee, software developer Bryan McEleney and, of course, the photographic team including Denis Mortell and others, who took the excellent, high resolution stills of the artworks, as well as the curatorial staff in IMMA.

Here are some links to the exhibitions:

<a href="http://imma.gallery-access.com/june2011/intl/en/index cymbalta price.php” target=”_blank”>Twenty: Celebrating 20 Years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art